Afternoon TG, (well, that's what it is down here)
My experience with 98ME is on a friend's computer - he need a fair bit of help. I don't particularly like it either, but put it down to my unfamiliarity with the user interface - a number of things are not where they are in 98SE and it has less DOS (if any), so I get command line withdrawals. Sick, eh?
In iSpeed, try for starters:-
MTU 576
MSS 536
RWIN 4x multiplier, then experiment with 8 in another session
TTL 64
I got all these from InternetBOOST and they work for me. Upload and download speed in the pcpitstop tests are good and pcpitstop does not recommend any changes to my system.
I use a 56k modem, but due to telephone technicalities in my location connect at max 44k. I average a sustained download rate on 44k connections of 3.7kB/sec, sometimes 4.0 or 4.1 (measured with Win98's System Monitor), so I'm pretty happy with those settings. It may be worth fiddling with different multiples of RWIN and different TTLs. Let's know how you go.
NDI CACHE - read the iSpeed help file. It's a new one for me, I've never fiddled with it as InternetBOOST doesn't mention it. I will have a play with it in iSpeed now that I have that prog.
Cheers
AA